Terms of Endearment
| From: | Chris Bates <christopher.bates@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, April 30, 2003, 13:24 |
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I was thinking about terms of endearment, how many people have included
them in their conlangs so far? There seem to be a surfeit in english:
love, dear, darling etc. I don't know how many there are in other
languages, I think french has mon cher / ma cherie but I don't know if
it has many others (I have this dodgy horror story in which one of the
main male characters is a frenchman in america, and he consistantly
calls the woman he likes ma petite), and I looked up the spanish for
dear and got querido/a which I thought was really nice lol (unless I'm
wrong querido = wanted).
While I was thinking about that I got onto "to love" and "to like". Do
many natural languages distinguish between the two? French doesn't (je
t'aime = I like/love you), but spanish does (amo = I love, me gusta(n) =
I like (lit it pleases me)), and a quick peruse of a dictionary suggests
that Latin didn't either. How many people have the distinction in their
conlang?
And finally, adjectives used as nouns. Do many conlangs/natlangs allow
free use of adjectives as nouns? English does but its restricted, there
are only a few adjectives that don't sound wrong when used as nouns (ie
the blond(e) the wise the old (the last two used only collectively)),
whereas spanish and french seem to allow much freer use of adjectives of
nouns (see ma petite above, and querido). Of course, this question has
no meaning if a language has stative verbs instead of adjectives.
Sorry, the first thing led onto the other two lol...
Chris.
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